"The Snakes of September" by Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz

All summer I heard themrustling in the shrubbery,outracing me from tierto tier in the garden,a whisper among the viburnums,a signal flashed from the hedgerow,a shadow pulsingin the barberry thicket.Now that the nights are chilland the annuals spent,I should have thought them gone,in a torpor of bloodslipped to the nether worldbefore the sickle frost.Not so. In the deceptive balmof noon, as if defiant of the cursethat spoiled another garden,these two appear on showthrough a narrow slitin the dense green brocadeof a north-country spruce,dangling head-down, entwinedin a brazen love-knot.I put out my hand and strokethe fine, dry grit of their skins.After all,we are partners in this land,co-signers of a covenant.At my touch the wildbraid of creationtrembles.Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) is one of the essential American poets--a writer who extended the traditions of poetry in English that go back to Chaucer and Shakespeare while being utterly American and fully contemporary. He also exercised broad influence as a teacher, because he mentored many of the best modern U.S. poets.Kunitz was still writing in his 90s, and the poems of his last years--this is one of them--have an extraordinary, concentrated beauty.

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I review British poetry for The Manhattan Review and write about music for The Elgar Society Journal. I also serve as one of the trustees for the Elgar Complete Edition, which is publishing a uniform edition of the composer's scores. My photographs have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and I have produced more than a dozen videos for The New York Times and McGraw-Hill.

I have contributed to textbooks published by Prentice-Hall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Oxford University Press.

My website is named after the world's first journal devoted entirely to literature and philosophy, launched by Friedrich Schiller in Tuebingen, Germany in 1795. Die Horen is the German name for the Horae, the Greek goddesses of the seasons.